Blue and white floral tattoo design of layered flower heads and leaves on a white card, shown on a pale wooden background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue delft-style floral design

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A drawn design of a cluster of large flower heads with smaller blooms, leaves and curling stems, shown in dark blue on white. The petals are outlined and shaded with lighter and darker blue washes, giving a porcelain-painting look. The design sits centrally on a white card placed on weathered pale wooden boards.

Botanical Flower Floral Leaves Stem Peony

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brush is still wet when the lamp fails, so you carry it up the spiral stairs in your teeth, holding the pot of cobalt in one hand and the rail in the other. Your father is asleep in the chair by the stove with his boots on. Outside, the wind is shouldering the tower the way it has since October, and the glass hums with it.

Keep reading

Up in the lamp room you find the fault in two minutes: a cracked mantle and a fuse that has given up. You know how to fix it because he taught you, the way he taught you to rest your wrist on a knuckle so the line does not wobble. Your hands are steady. The blue on the bristles is the colour of the plates on the dresser downstairs, the ones with the windmills and the little bridge, the set your grandmother carried over from Delft with straw packed around every rim.

Peonies were the flower she painted most. Fat, quarrelsome heads, leaves curled like cupped hands, a stem that loops back on itself as if it has forgotten where it was going. You learned on the back of a serving dish. Now you paint them onto tiles you fire in the kiln shed and sell at the harbour fair in summer, and the money goes on oil and wicks and nothing else.

When the beam swings out over the water again, it throws your own pattern across the sea: a bloom of white light, the shadow of a stem, and far out, a fishing boat turning for home because it can see the light is back.